Tuesday’s Gone: Photo# 26

My first, longed-for, hoped-for, faught-for pregnancy ended as quickly as it bagan. Over the weekend I started having inklings that something was wrong. It first came as an ominous gut feeling and was then fueled by gradually fading pink lines on the pregnancy tests I (maybe unwisely) kept taking twice a day. I was so worried about it that I had a pretty miserable day yesterday, despite the yarn-dyeing party, and Randy drove three hours to Wooster, Ohio to get me and drive me home so that we could be together. He said he’d have driven 10 hours if I needed him to. I don’t deserve him.

This morning I woke up and took another test before driving up to my fertility clinic for my scheduled follow-up blood test. There was maybe a faint pink line…maybe. A shadow of where a line should have been, used to be. So it wasn’t a surprise when the clinic called me this afternoon to tell me my hormone levels had dropped from 40 to 5 and that it is all over. The embryo(s) stopped secreting the HCG hormone, which means they have stopped developing and I am having an early miscarraige. I got the phone call in public, in a busy store, with Mary Ellen where we were shopping for camp supplies. She took care of everything and had me go to the car where I could lose what was left of my composure in private.

What I feel now is complicated. I’m devastated that another chance at motherhood is gone after just a taste. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that I suck so much at this – I couldn’t even stay pregnant for a week. I feel stupid for already announcing the pregnancy, only to let everyone down. Yet at the same time I feel backed into a corner by the nature of the treatments – unless we keep the treatments a secret (which isn’t our style) we can’t really keep anything a secret because people can do the math and figure out when we should have news. I feel both ready to try again to get back that glorious fleeting success and battered and drained like I can’t put myself through this again. I feel like everything about this is too hard and I wish that I didn’t want it anymore. I wish the desire for a baby was gone and we could just take our money and go to Hawaii or buy a bigger house and be happy. I feel like God isn’t looking out for us or just isn’t there. I feel like so many people come by their pregnancies too easily and don’t appreciate thier kids and don’t deserve to have them. I feel like the world is completely messed up and unfair and that life is nothing but pain and chaos. I feel like I hate our embryos because they are losers. Then I feel guilty for hating them. I feel like we’ll have better luck with our frozens. I feel encouraged by the statistics that show that women who get a positive test (even followed by an unsucessful pregnancy) are much more likely to go on to have a baby in the future. I feel like there’s something wrong with our DNA or my uterus and we’ll be among the unlucky few who never find IVF success. I feel foolish for taking so many home pregnancy tests but glad that I did because it led us to get an early official test. And while its hard to know that we lost something, I think it would have been harder to think that the IVF didn’t work at all (which would have been the case if we hadn’t taken any home tests and kept today as our original first testing date).

I don’t know exactly where we go from here. Our next step will be to transfer our frozens. But we don’t know when that will be. We need a break. So we’re taking a little break. And I think we’ll keep the next cycle a little more private for a little longer to protect ourselves. So that next time I make excited announcements they can hopefully be a little more pemanent.